OPTIMAL INVESTMENT UNDER RELATIVE PERFORMANCE CONCERNS

We consider the problem of optimal investment when agents take into account their relative performance by comparison to their peers. Given N interacting agents, we consider the following optimization problem for agent i, : where is the utility function of agent i, his portfolio, his wealth, the average wealth of his peers, and is the parameter of relative interest for agent i. Together with some mild technical conditions, we assume that the portfolio of each agent i is restricted in some subset . We show existence and uniqueness of a Nash equilibrium in the following situations:

• ‐ unconstrained agents,
• ‐ constrained agents with exponential utilities and Black–Scholes financial market.

We also investigate the limit when the number of agents N goes to infinity. Finally, when the constraints sets are vector spaces, we study the impact of the s on the risk of the market.     

Econometric forecasts of tourism demand to 2005

A complete system of demand equations which was developed previously to generate forecasts of tourism imports and exports is modified to allow for destination-specific demand structures in the tourism export functions. The new model is shown to be considerably more realistic than the original one, and represents a major conceptual improvement. Furthermore, the modified complete system of demand equations yields more accurate outof-sample forecasts, across both varying time horizons and types of forecast. The new model is used to generate forecasts of tourism imports and exports for 18 countries and various major geographical areas, including the recently expanded European Union, for the period up to 2005 for different scenarios.     

The asymptotic distribution of Nagar's bias-adjusted TSLS estimator under partial identification

The asymptotic distribution of the Nagar bias-adjusted two-stage-least-squares estimator is studied under the assumption of partial identification when the number of instruments increases at the same rate as the sample size and the errors are normally distributed.     

ACCOUNTING FOR RISK AVERSION, VESTING, JOB TERMINATION RISK AND MULTIPLE EXERCISES IN VALUATION OF EMPLOYEE STOCK OPTIONS

We present a valuation framework that captures the main characteristics of employee stock options (ESOs), which financial regulations now require to be expensed in firms' accounting statements. The value of these options is much less than Black–Scholes prices for corresponding market-traded options due to the suboptimal exercising strategies of the holders, which arise from risk aversion, trading and hedging constraints, and job termination risk. We analyze the combined effect of all of these factors along with the standard ESO features of multiple exercising rights, and vesting periods. This leads to the study of a chain of nonlinear free-boundary problems of reaction-diffusion type. We find that job termination risk, vesting, finite maturity and non-zero interest rates are significant contributors to the ESO cost. However, we find that in the presence of vesting, the impact of allowing multiple exercise rights on ESO cost is negligible.     

Utility of gambling II: risk,paradoxes, and data

We specialize our results on entropy-modified representations of event-based gambles to representations of probability-based gambles by assuming an implicit event structure underlying the probabilities, and adding assumptions linking the qualitative properties of the former and the latter. Under segregation and under duplex decomposition, we obtain numerical representations consisting of a linear weighted utility term plus a term corresponding to information-theoretical entropies. These representations accommodate the Allais paradox and most of the data due to Birnbaum and associates. A representation of mixed event-and probability-based gambles accommodates the Ellsberg paradox. We suggest possible extensions to handle the data not accommodated.      

多边贷款是否促进了公共投资

自中国恢复世行成员国合法席位以来,多边贷款一直是我国公共投资的重要来源,它占公共投资的比例最高达到27%,平均8.6%,累计金额已达数百亿美元.这些贷款是促进了中国的公共投资水平,还是提高了政府消费,又或者降低了税收,这方面的评价研究很少.本文在宏观经济学的相关理论和模型基础上建立起一套Cowles Commission结构方程组,分别利用1978～2001年的国家和省级两层数据,对上述问题进行了评价.我们的计量分析结果表明,多边贷款并没有促进公共投资的增长,反而降低了税收,提高了政府消费水平.这种影响不同地区是有差异的.总的来看,这种传统意义上的消极影响没有波及私人投资和经济增长.     

Increasing risk: Dynamic mean-preserving spreads

We extend the celebrated Rothschild and Stiglitz (1970) definition of Mean-Preserving Spreads to a dynamic framework. We adapt the original integral conditions to transition probability densities, and give sufficient conditions for their satisfaction. We then focus on a class of nonlinear scalar diffusion processes, the super-diffusive ballistic process, and prove that it satisfies the integral conditions. We further prove that this class is unique among Brownian bridges. This class of processes can be generated by a random superposition of linear Markov processes with constant drifts. This exceptionally simple representation enables us to systematically revisit, by means of the properties of dynamic mean-preserving spreads, workhorse economic models originally based on White Gaussian Noise. A selection of four examples is presented and explicitly solved.     

Boussinesq方程的二阶椭圆余弦驻波解

等深浅水域中的流体运动可由Boussinesq方程描述。众所周知,该方程有行进波解（孤立波及椭圆余弦波）。本文则以Boussinesq方程为控制方程,利用渐近匹配法对椭圆余弦波在直墙上反射进行研究,给出了反射过程中内、外场波形及速度变化的解析表达,从而得到了Boussinesq方程的二阶椭圆余弦驻波型的解析解,并讨论了这类驻波的若干性质。当波长无限增大时,所得解析解收敛于孤立波的情况。这些解析结果不仅有助于揭示岸坡对非线性浅水波影响的力学机理,在海岸防护和开发和岸壁附近结构物的设计条件等工程领域中也具有现实的指导意义。     

On irregular functionals of SDEs and the Euler scheme

We prove a sharp upper bound for the error $\mathbb {E}|g(X)-g(\hat{X})|^{p}We prove a sharp upper bound for the error in terms of moments of , where X and are random variables and the function g is a function of bounded variation. We apply the results to the approximation of a solution to a stochastic differential equation at time T by the Euler scheme, and show that the approximation of the payoff of the binary option has asymptotically sharp strong convergence rate 1/2. This has consequences for multilevel Monte Carlo methods. The author was supported by the Finnish Graduate School in Stochastics and Statistics, the Ellen and Artturi Nyyss?nen Foundation, and the Academy of Finland, project #110599.